Can I Sing You A Song?

My name is James Moore, and I’m a musician from Chicago. When I’m not playing music I work part-time as a video editor and production assistant; And in that industry, the work comes in waves.

Last Spring work was slow and a coworker and I were forced to take a day off, it was then I first thought about Can I Sing You a Song?

That coworker was filmmaker Jimmy Kurzawa. We’d met each other just a few months earlier when he started as an intern during his last semester of college. We both had big dreams and big plans to get us there; Instantly we became friends.

We wanted to make the most of our day off so we decided to work on something that could benefit both our careers, we called it, “Can I Sing You a Song?”. The concept was simple: Instead of standing still and busking to people walking on the street, we decided to take music to people who were just hanging out… and film it. In order to make it more interactive for the listener we also gave them the options of hearing a serenade, sing-a-long, or a mystery song.

Our trial run that day proved to be a huge success. While we had a handful of people who weren’t interested, we had more than twice as many who were.

For the next two and a half months we were slammed with video projects. We were working close to 50 hours per week and were getting emails at all hours of the night for “last minute” changes. By the time July was coming to an end we needed a break. It was right around then that Jimmy first mentioned the road trip to me.

Jimmy had dreamed of going on a road trip to the West Coast since high school. For one reason or another though it just never happened. Now, he was in a unique situation. At this company, as long as we didn’t miss any deadlines we could take off whenever we wanted. In addition, his long-time friend and fellow road trip dreamer, Wade Stofko, had just graduated from SIUC and had no obligations until mid-August. These unique circumstances created the perfect storm, all he needed now was something to film…

Jimmy asked me if I was interested in going and I think the idea kind of came to both of us at the same time: What if we did Can I Sing You a Song? on the road trip? It could create new content for me, it could give Jimmy the documentary he’d be looking for, and it’d be a ton of fun. After two weeks of preparations, we left on a journey that would end up being two of the best weeks of my life.

And it all started with one question:

Can I Sing You a Song?

The first two episodes of the series will premiere exclusively on Youtube July 6th. After that, they will release one new episode each week for the next month.